As I’m climbing into the truck, I notice a piece of paper stuck under the windshield wiper. Caroline plucks it up and is in the process of crinkling it into a ball before I stop her.
“Let me see that,” I say.
She hands it over. There’s not much text, except a bold typeface on the header that reads STOP THE MARCHES AND MAKE A REAL DIFFERENCE. Below is the URL for a website. I look out the dirty window to check if the cowboy is handing out any more pamphlets, but he’s gone. I shove the paper into my pocket while Caroline secures the guitar behind her seat.
It takes us an eternity to reach home. Caroline accelerates into the curves and is late applying the brake, but the pills have me too high to mind being tossed around the cab. Out the window, trees with trunks white as false teeth pass by. Crows pick a few bites from roadkill splattered across the margins before flying away from our approaching grille. Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road” plays on the radio, but I turn it down. Music only makes the memories of Angela stronger. Better to listen to tires on the busted blacktop, the wind rushing in through the cracked windows. I know she will be in my dreams tonight.
There is no bridge across the creek that separates my house from the lone dirt road leading back toward civilization. It has one shallow bend that can be forded by a vehicle if it rides high enough. The county would build something if I kicked up a fuss, but I view it as a useful deterrent. If anyone wants to find me, they’ll have to risk being washed away by a high swell.
My father baptized me in this creek. Broke ice from idle December waters and plunged me under. After my back began to curve, he took me to the creek again. This time a witch woman named Lady Crawford anointed me in oil. She covered every inch of me until I was slick and said that the Lord might provide his salvation. That night I learned two things: I’d never see a doctor and my father would never be sane.
Caroline parks the truck in the driveway and hops out. “Need help?” she asks. She offers a hand, but I just shake my head. Caroline walks toward the house. I watch her go, those long legs cutting through high grass perfect for snakes. Once inside, I check out the website on the flyer, which turns out to be the page for an environmental whistle-blower group called The Watchmen. The site is full of videos of oil spills where animals lie beached and covered in the combustible liquid. Clips where methane gas, only visible through the filter of a special lens, boils from the earth. Fracking operations where Midwesterners can light their tap water on fire. The more I see, the more I begin to wonder just how much the poisoned creek I was baptized in affected my body. Did the pollution change me while I formed in my mother’s womb, or was the damage done when my father dunked me? Is there an answer here, or is the reason nothing more than the random shit luck of genetic mutation?
I remind myself that not all the material online has equal merit. The problem with the unlimited information of the Internet is so many fraudulent claims. The ravings of liars, bots and misinformed reactionaries can be easier to find than legitimate journalism. Still, the videos are hard to ignore. What I can’t reconcile is the messages of warning on the site versus the man who left the flyer. This seems like the work of a benign progressive group, the sort to push for legislation guaranteeing lower emission rates and recycling programs. The cowboy seemed weary past words.
* * *
• • •
I should be writing for Angela instead of reading all this, but more and more, all I want is to escape into my secret project. It’s a concept album that’s been formulating since I began watching the environmental protests happening in my backyard. All the songs are performed by a sick minstrel I’ve created who travels a wasteland version of America with only his guitar, playing concerts for the beasts along the road or the starving strangers he meets. No narrative existed early on. Just daydreams of the man lost, singing among bleached bones until eventually he found a boy hiding in the graveyard of some city.
As soon as the boy entered the fantasy, I knew I had to finish. I didn’t want my own project, but when I picked up the guitar it was like playing old classics instead of writing new material. That’s never happened before. I also knew The Troubadours couldn’t have these songs. Of course, now that I’ve made that decision, I’m not sure what to do about it. After I provide Angela with the last few songs I owe her, I’ve only got enough money squirreled away to sustain a few years of isolation. What I don’t have is money for a proper studio to record and master these new tracks, and I can’t keep writing for Angela if I want to make my own music again. I’m not that productive.
A bigger issue is whether people will accept the music from me. I decided a long time ago that the world needed my magic but didn’t want to hear it coming from such a ruined man. It wasn’t just my insecurity. I’ve watched enough audience reactions to know it’s an unpleasant truth. While the grotesque can create, they aren’t a welcome vessel for presentation. At least, I used to think this. The moment in the pawnshop has me questioning that belief.
I close my eyes and try to tap into where I left off in the narrative of my last song. The man walking tired and hungry. The boy beginning to lag. The child is ignorant of the old world, so the man instructs his younger companion with history lessons set to music. The lyrics chronicle a world our hubris destroyed, referencing blue skies and lush vegetation the boy will never see. When they rest during the day, the man sings the kid to sleep with songs about places more than ash. The boy hums them when they travel by moonlight. Some nights, I hear these wasteland lullabies when I lie down to rest. Clear and bright, accompanied by the lonesome sound of a harmonica with a busted reed the man has scavenged.
* * *
• • •
I’m outside on the porch, picking out a verse for Angela when I smell something on the wind. A scent that reminds me of fires from my youth. My father often preached at revival bonfires, the night lit up as if God’s power radiated through him. Sometimes the congregation threw books and records they found sinful on the blaze. Those flames always burned the highest. The scent of melting vinyl and old leather bindings lingered in my hair for days afterward.
I see the plume of dust first, then a black hearse materializes in the distance, bouncing hard over potholes in the dirt road. Its windows are tinted a presidential black. Even with mourners at the door, no funeral home ever risked its Cadillac on these trails. When the chicken farmer’s wife passed years ago, her coffin was strapped down in the bed of a pickup and brought home to be interred beneath some apple trees. The same with my father. I lean on my cane as the vehicle stops in the middle of the road. The death wagon is an old Lincoln with a grille like a lunatic’s smile. Creekwater beads on the polished hood, and I wonder how they ever made it across.
Two men climb out. The passenger is a lanky scarecrow of a man that I recognize immediately. The cowboy from the protest. Closer, I see he’s wearing a different western-cut gingham shirt, straight-leg jeans and a rodeo belt buckle that glints in the sun. The brown felt hat sits low on his head as he saunters forward in ostrich-skin boots. The sandalwood grip of a six-shooter juts from the holster on his antiquated gun belt.